Lt. Col. Loren Toohey, USAF, Retired, passed away on November 19, 2016 at the Blue Skies of Texas Retirement Community in San Antonio, Texas. Loren was born March 2, 1921 in Antioch, Nebraska, and spent his early years in Hemingford and Alliance, Nebraska. Loren was related to both the Danbom and Toohey families.
In 1942, Loren married Leona "Maxine" Caha and they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary before Maxine p...
Read More

Herbert (Herb) R. Barghusen, a longtime resident of Hyde Park in Chicago and more recently of Ogden Dunes, IN, died on December 25, 2015 in Chesterton, IN after an illness of several months.
Born July 9, 1933 in Englewood, New Jersey to Lydia Bertha (nee Weber) and John Joseph Barghusen, Herb spent his youth in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. He often recounted his pleasure in crossing the bridge into the city to vi...
Read More

The European Journal of Taxonomy (EJT) is a peer-reviewed international journal on descriptive taxonomy. Its content is fully electronic and available in Open Access. EJT is the only taxonomic journal that collectively covers zoology and plant-related sciences, including fossils.
EJT is published and funded by a consortium of European natural history institutions.
EJT is a diamond open access journal, where all content is freely ...
Read More

The GLVP annual dinner for LGBT members and allies will be held during SVP 2016 in Salt Lake City on Thursday evening, October 27, at Stoneground Kitchen, 249 E 400 Street, Salt Lake City, 84111 at 6:30 pm.
Please RSVP Mark D. Uhen at muhen@gmu.edu if you would like to attend.
Read More

SVP Annual Meeting in 2019 will be held in
Brisbane, Australia's New World City
A truly unique experience - The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology has never previously held a meeting in Australia, or even in the Southern Hemisphere! 2019 offers the opportunity for the first SVP Meeting in Gondwana. Australia is a mature, politically and economically stable country. It is culturally rich, with a 60,000 year old history of anci...
Read More

On March 16, NSF placed the Collections in Support of Biological Research (CSBR) program on hiatus for fiscal year 2017 in order to evaluate its long-term funding needs and its priority within the Biological Sciences Directorate. CSBR supports special initiatives within vertebrate paleontology collections, including upgrades to infrastructure, digitization, and curating orphaned collections. While on hiatus, NSF is actively s...
Read More

iDigBio’s Outlier Detection and Documentation by Collectors Working Group is conducting a survey related to your experience with “outliers” (or “anomalies” or “oddities”) in biodiversity collections. For this survey, outliers are defined as individual specimens that differ from a previously documented or perceived general norm within a taxon in any biological characteristic such as morphol...
Read More

Jack's family has announced that the Celebration of His Life to be held on April 9, 2016 (info below). Please RSVP to dacapoacres@charter.net so they can plan catering properly. Feel free to share this information.
A celebration of the life of Dr. John S. McIntoshSaturday, April 9: 2-5 PM
Daniel Family Common Wesleyan University
45 Wyllys Ave Middletown, Ct.
This is to be a fun sharing of memories, pictures, and st...
Read More

Elwyn Simons, Fossil Expert and Primat Conservationist, Dies at 85.
DURHAM, NC - Duke scientist-explorer Elwyn Simons, who studied living and extinct primates for more than 50 years, died in his sleep on Sunday, March 6, in Peoria, Arizona. He was 85.
The extended article on Dr. Simons passing is published on Duke Today.
Read More

New edition of the course "Introduction to Ecological Data Analysis - 2nd Edition", October 3rd- 7th, 2016.Instructor: Dr. Øyvind Hammer (University of Oslo, Norway).
For this course we will use the free and friendly Past [http://folk.uio.no/ohammer/past/] software (written by the lecturer), but the methods are equally relevant for users of other programs. This course is aimed at postgraduate students, postdoctoral researc...
Read More

Iceman Reborn
Watch as Otzi, a 5000-year-old mummy, is brought to life and preserved with 3D modeling. Airing February 17, 2016 at 9pm on PBS. He was stalked, attacked and left to die alone. Murdered more than 5,000 years ago, Otzi the Iceman is Europe’s oldest known natural mummy. Miraculously preserved in glacial ice, his remarkably intact remains continue to provide scientists, historians, and archeologists with groundbreak...
Read More

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Juan López Cantalapiedra (Museum für Naturkunde, Germany).
FOR WHOM?: This course is aimed at postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and established academics.
First, this course will introduce participants to the use, modification and representation of phylogenetic trees. Then, we will focus on the use of phylogenetic information to reconstruct ancestral characters and biogeographic histories, learning how...
Read More

Peter Forey was one of the world’s leading palaeoichthyologists and at the forefront of the cladistics revolution in the 1980s. Together with Don Rosen, Colin Patterson and Brian Gardiner, he was known as one of the ‘Gang of Four’ whose arguments in favour of phylogenetic systematics as a guiding principle in evolutionary biology earned them opprobrium and praise in equal measure, with the added benefit of being fir...
Read More

II Iberian Symposium on Geometric MorphometricsIt is a pleasure to announce the II Iberian Symposium on Geometric Morphometrics, which will be held in Madrid (Spain) 9th-10th of June, 2016. This time, the II ISGM is being organized by the Transmitting Science, The Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, and the Institut Català de Paleontologia M. C. You can find all the information at the Symposium webpage: www.2isgm.transmittings...
Read More

John Stanton “Jack” McIntosh (1923–2015).
With the passing of Jack McIntosh, vertebrate paleontology has lost one of its greats and a friend and colleague to many across the globe. He fell under the spell of sauropods at the age of six after seeing the Diplodocus mount during a visit to the Carnegie Museum. By the age of 13 he was corresponding with paleontolog...
Read More

A WELL-PRESERVED SKELETON REVEALS THE ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTION OF EARLY CARNIVOROUS MAMMALSDEERFIELD, IL USA (December, 2015) – Prior to the rise of modern day mammalian carnivores (lions and tigers and bears, as well as weasels, raccoons, wolves and other members of the order Carnivora), North America was dominated by a now extinct group of mammalian carnivores – the hyaenodontids. While fossils of hyaenodontids are r...
Read More

DALLAS, TX (October, 2015) – Dinosaur nasal passages were certainly nothing to sneeze at. Possessing among the largest and most complex nasal passages seen in animals, their function has puzzled paleontologists. New research suggests that the size and shape of these nasal passages would have allowed incoming air to cool the blood making its way to the brain, maintaining the brain at an optimum temperature. The study was present...
Read More

DALLAS, TX (October, 2015) – Most people know that ‘warm-bloodedness’ is a characteristic of mammals. This trait actually encompasses a suite of physiological processes that help to maintain a relatively high, constant body temperature using heat generated internally. A new study by Christen Don Shelton of the University of Cape Town, South Africa and his colleague, Martin Sander at the University of Bon...
Read More

DALLAS, TX (October, 2015) - Among the many groups of marine reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs, elasmosaurs are famous for their necks, which can have up to 76 vertebrae and make up more than half the total length of the animal. These “sea dragons” attained worldwide distribution and vanished only during the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous 66 million years ago.
Fossils of the elasmosaur Aristonectes...
Read More

SVP is on Facebook

And on Twitter

SVP NEWS

As a follow-up to the September live show and radio broadcast that featured work of some SVP members in the Triassic of Bears Ears National Monument (Indian Creek area), ScienceFriday just posted an extensive multimedia-rich digital story on the research there: https://methods.sciencefriday.com/the-mass-extinction-detectives
The story features quotes from a number of SVP members.
Science Friday also produced an accompanying short a...
Read More

The Natural History Museum in London is asking for your help in preserving and making accessible a major palaeontological attraction in London. The Crystal Palace Dinosaurs are a series of some 30 life-size models of dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures in Crystal Palace Park. As well as attracting thousands of visitors a year, they have great historical importance as they date from the 1850s, were designed by Sir Richard Owen a...
Read More